The power dip was felt as far south as the power plant that I work at in Florida. I went to work at 6 pm last night and was looking at our trends for different parameters we monitor. It looks like there was a massive load hit about 1612 according to our computers. Our 3 turbines all shed a massive amount of load at that time, and then recovered. It appears that many plants farther north and closer to the problem were not able to handle the hit on the grid because it just gets worse the closer you are. We are in Florida so there is a bit of cushion.
One of the larger problems they are going to have is that they lost 9 nuclear plants on this shutdown. Those are probably putting out somewhere in the area of 9 THOUSAND megawatts of power and it takes a day or longer to get those started back up. At least one of them will have had something fail during the shutdown that will require repair and it will be even longer for that plant to get back on the grid.
What you will see is power being restored to the areas surrounding the smaller blackstart capable power plants first. The plants do not require electrical power from the grid to start up, but they are rather small. They rely on small diesel sets to provide the power until they are self reliant and then they will power up a small portion of the grid in their area.
The system dispatchers will then route the power provided by these small units towards the areas that have larger generators that are not blackstart capable. These units can take several hours to bring online, and a few of them may not come back up because of equipment failures also. You have to realize that these turbines and generators are much more sophisticated than the average car and they tend to not take being stressed with a unit trip (bringing the unit offline suddenly) very well.
I heard a reported saying that a $0.25 part to a $500 part may be to blame. $500 is really more like the low end for parts at my facility and the skies the limit for the upper end.
Once they get the medium sized units running, you will see power in the area surrounding these plants restored. Just think of it as ripples of water around something that was dropped in the lake. They will bring the load back on a little at a time so as not to overload the unit and it will be brought back in stages...they just don't turn it all on at once because everyone still has all of their equipment plugged in and ready to start. When an electric appliance starts up, there is a massive surge in current that dies down quickly after the appliance starts up. Imagine 100,000 dryers, refrigerators and lights all coming on at once with massive surge in current and that would quickly overload the system so they bring it back a little at a time to absorb that starting current.
Now that the medium sized units are running, they will be looking at bringing back the nuclear sites and other large facilities. They were actually doing this all along, but these just take longer to bring on line, and so they tend to start up last.
You really don't have anything to worry about the nuc plants going offline and being unsafe. I worked in the commercial nuclear industry for years before moving onto something less stressful. The systems that they have there are redundant to the point of unbelievablity...backup to a backup to...well just don't worry to much about them. The plants are designed to be shutdown safely and they have huge backup generator sets on the sites that can provide the power to run the safety systems while the blackout in the area is occurring.
I would bet it is going to take a couple of days before everyone has power restored, but hang in there. Treat the speculation about what happened with skeptisism for a few days. They have massive amounts of data to pore over to figure out what went wrong and it will eventually be tracked down. I have heard some theories that sounded right on the money, but you just never know.
Hope this clears up some things for you guys and feel free to ask questions. I will answer them if I can.
). Atitokan area reportedly did black out for a while (says the field crew from my lab - who shrugged and headed back to the bush, where there never is any power anyways).
